LNS, Bates Plan Conference

PANIC XII

LNS, Bates Accelerator

To Host Conference

By Eugene F. Mallove

News Office

A large MIT gathering will soon focus its attention on some exceedingly 
small matters--quite literally. In June, about 700 physicists from 
around the world will meet on the MIT campus at a major international 
conference devoted to advances in understanding matter at the subatomic 
level.

"PANIC XII," the Twelfth International Conference on Particles and 
Nuclei, will take place June 25-29. Hosting the meeting will be MIT's 
Laboratory for Nuclear Science (LNS) and its associated Bates Linear 
Accelerator Center in Middleton, about 20 miles north of the MIT campus. 

The PANIC Conference, last held in Kyoto in 1987, has not been held in 
the United States since 1975, when it met in Santa Fe, N.M. The honorary 
chairman for this year's conference, Institute Professor Emeritus Victor 
F. Weisskopf, was one of the meeting's originators in 1963, and this 
year he will close the conference with some reflections on the 
development of nuclear and particle physics over the last half century.

The conference will encompass the most recent results from very low 
energies, where fundamental physical symmetries characteristic of 
nature's basic forces are tested, to the highest energies now available 
with particle accelerators. By smashing nature's clockwork--setting up 
violent collisions among particles and observing carefully the resulting 
scattered "debris" fragments--physicists gain understanding of the 
forces and phenomena that rule the subatomic world.

The conference organizers are MIT Professor Arthur K. Kerman, director 
of LNS, and Professor Ernest J. Moniz, director of the Bates Linear 
Accelerator Center. Dr. T. William Donnelly  is the  scientific 
secretary;  Professors Robert Redwine and Robert Jaffe chair the program 
committee;  and Dr. Steven Steadman chairs the local organizing 
committee. The planning committee includes Sheila Dodson, William Lobar 
and Jean Flanagan.

The Laboratory for Nuclear Science is a natural host for a conference 
with the breadth of PANIC. Established in 1946, LNS is now the largest 
university-based program of nuclear and elementary particle physics in 
the country. LNS also includes the activities of MIT's Center for 
Theoretical Physics.

LNS's Bates accelerator is operated under the joint auspices of MIT and 
the US Department of Energy. About 250 scientists from more than 50 
universities and laboratories are involved in its research program. The 
research there has produced about 60 PhDs from MIT and other 
universities and currently involves about 25 MIT graduate students.

Since its initial operation in 1972 (construction began in 1967), the 
Bates laboratory has been dedicated to basic research into the structure 
of protons, neutrons, and atomic nuclei, all of which are subject to the 
strongest of the four basic forces of nature, the nuclear force. The 
facility centers on a 200 meter long linear accelerator, around which 
are arranged various particle detectors and analyzers.

		 

A New Beginning

The PANIC meeting comes at a time when LNS scientists are developing 
important initiatives that will use a a variety of new accelerator 
capabilities.High energy physicists are advancing frontier R&D and are 
generating proposals for major programs at the Superconducting 
Supercollider (SSC) in Texas. The SSC is expected to achieve particle 
collision energies of 40TeV (trillion electron volts) later in the 
decade.

Heavy ion physicists at LNS are also preparing for experiments at the 
Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), where the goal will be to 
produce and characterize a new form of matter known as the "quark-gluon 
plasma." 

Quarks are particles that compose the more familiar protons and 
neutrons. But an understanding of how these exotic quarks glue 
themselves together as triplets to form protons and neutrons is central 
to understanding the strong nuclear force, one of the four fundamental 
forces.	

A large group of intermediate energy physicists at LNS is focussing on 
precision studies of nuclear structure and forces by using the intense 
1GeV (billion electron volt) electron beam at the Bates laboratory.

A major new extension of the Bates laboratory, the $14.8 million  South 
Hall Ring, will provide novel capabilities to the MIT group as well as 
to the national research community in 1992.

When it is finished, the South Hall Ring project will provide two basic 
new experimental capabilities: (1) It will allow the accelerator's beam 
of electrons to strike gaseous targets unimpeded, without first 
penetrating any kind of window; and (2) The particle storage ring--a 
"pulse stretcher ring"-- will smooth or spread the beam into one that is 
continuous, in contrast to its present pulsed mode of operation.

Smoothing the beam will help physicists resolve the details of 
individual collisions, some of which may be rare and unusually important 
to study. The South Hall Ring will provide yet another experimental 
tool: the ability to employ gaseous targets in which the nuclei of the 
gas atoms are polarized--their magnetic spins lining up in one 
direction. This will be a virtually unique capability in the world 
community of electron accelerators.

		

Connected to the World

In addition to experimental work at Bates, the Laboratory participates 
in research at Fermilab (Batavia, Ill.), Brookhaven National Laboratory 
(Upton, N.Y.), Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (Palo Alto, Calif.), 
and Gran Sasso (Frascati, Italy).

LNS is also playing a major role in activities at CERN (European Center 
for Nuclear Research, Geneva, Switzerland), including management of the 
$200 million international "L3" particle detector project. Since 1982, 
Professor Samuel C.C. Ting has been the scientific leader of what may 
likely be the most widespread international cooperative effort in high 
energy particle physics. The L3 detector project at CERN's Large 
Electron Positron accelerator is being coordinated through LNS.

The L3 detector project is the first collaboration between Europe, the 
Soviet Union, the United States, and the People's Republic of China. 
Some 400 physicists and 1,000 engineers are supporting this quest for 
evidence for the fundamental "Higgs boson"--perhaps the key to the 
origin of the different masses of fundamental particles. In the US 
alone, 12 universities other than MIT are involved in the effort.